Category: Science

Einstein had a very high IQ. He was right about a lot of things but wrong about a lot of things. He was socially awkward, known for being lost in a mental fog/aydreaming, and having trouble with things like poor dress and hygiene. He was a nice guy, and everybody liked him. But you wouldn’t want him in charge of anything important. Which, by the way, he would have agreed with.

What IQ tests fundamentally measure is your ability to learn academic materials in a standard academic environment, and test for those skills that are good for those things. Which is useful to know about yourself, but it’s not apparent to me that we should allow such people to run society.

Indeed, a strong case could be made that anyone with an IQ over above, say, 115 or 120 is inherently dangerous and untrustworthy. Until they prove otherwise, of course.

IQ says nothing at all about virtue: integrity, honor, loyalty, or the ability to be dispassionate when you need to be vs. knowing when you should be passionate. It has no ability to predict your moral sense at all, and if history is any guide high IQ people tend to be more prone to being amoral and to thinking they can invent and rationalize their own morality.

High IQ people can be very good at manipulating and fooling otherwise good and honest people who aren’t as quick as they are. High IQ people also, at least if my decades of observations are worth anything, have an unfortunate tendency to think they are a natural elite, and often seem to wish to be treated that way.

Furthermore, we have no test for Sociopathy/Psychopathy. You may know a sociopath and not know it. Worse, sociopathy is a particularly dangerous mental condition when married to a high IQ. Which means, in a very realistic sense, while it may not be fair, if you meet someone and say they have a very high IQ, you should watch for signs of sociopathy, narcissism, arrogance, cockiness, and other personality defects. Not all high IQ people are like this, but an awful lot of them are.

Thus, if anything, our society should begin looking at the assumptions underlying the IQ tests and their importance–and also, how much we should ever trust men who are too clever.

For example, I recognize Vox Day as an extraordinarily brilliant man, with an obviously very high IQ (165 I think he’s had it published as). I very much enjoy him, and I do respect him and his lovely wife–though we’ve never met in person, we had a Twitter relationship at one time. But despite his brilliance, he’s quite often so full of himself it’s funny, and he has blind spots all over the place that are sometimes hilarious to watch. All because of his high IQ and how important he appears to think that makes his analyses, without apparently being aware of how quickly that can turn into arrogance and hubris.

I don’t mean to pick on Vox Day. When I look at the writings and thoughts of many other high IQ individuals, like Aaron Clarey or other figures who talk about their high IQs, I do see sometimes brilliant men doing brilliant things, but I also see high-IQ schmucks and douchebags and autistics who can’t even understand basic logic, such as Lawrence Krauss.

By the way I have a high IQ. How high is none of your business, but statistically it’s better than college professors on average for sure. I just find flashing one’s IQ to be vulgar, and to contribute to the mindset where we equate being very very clever with being virtuous, trustworthy, and fit to set the direction of society.

My very high-IQ friend John C. Wright says it well: having a high IQ is like having one very large and superstrong arm. It’s kind of cool, and it’s kind of useful, and it’s kind of dangerous, but that’s about it. It says very little else about you as a person that’s of value.

Max Kolbe of Michigan, also known as Dean Esmay (but his friends still call him Max) starred in Cassie Jaye’s Red Pill Movie. He is former publisher of Dean’s World, contributor to The Moderate Voice, former Managing Editor of A Voice for Men, and a general rabble-rouser.

Start to question Atheist belief and funny things happen—you get better at science and more! Join us as one of the founders of the Freedom from Atheism Foundation explains his own escape from atheism working as a scientist.

Max Kolbe of Michigan, also known as Dean Esmay (but his friends still call him Max) starred in Cassie Jaye’s Red Pill Movie. He is former publisher of Dean’s World, contributor to The Moderate Voice, former Managing Editor of A Voice for Men, and a general rabble-rouser.

This is science that’s been hidden from people for decades now by pernicious so-called “Skeptics” who are completely dishonest about what the research actually shows, on this and many other topics (NDEs anyone?).

Max Kolbe of Michigan, also known as Dean Esmay (but his friends still call him Max) starred in Cassie Jaye’s Red Pill Movie. He is former publisher of Dean’s World, contributor to The Moderate Voice, former Managing Editor of A Voice for Men, and a general rabble-rouser.

WiseGEEK What is DMT?
http://www.wisegeek.org/what-is-dmt.htm
Science Set Free:
https://smile.amazon.com/Science-Set-…
Born Believers:
https://smile.amazon.com/Born-Believe…
The Case for the Soul (See all four parts):

DMT: The Spirit Molecule:
https://smile.amazon.com/DMT-Molecule…
Near Death Experience Research Foundation:
http://nderf.org/
DMT Powerful Journeys
http://reset.me/story/powerful-dmt-jo…
Sheldrake’s research on Telepathy and such:
https://sheldrake.org/
The Science Delusion:

13 powerful DMT journies:
http://reset.me/story/powerful-dmt-jo…
What Is Quantum Weirdness
https://science.howstuffworks.com/sci…
Plato’s Theory of Space and the Geometrical Composition of the Elements
https://rd.springer.com/chapter/10.10…

This man is a Zoologist, whose Selfish Gene, Memetic Theory, and God As Delusion hypotheses are all debunked pseudoscience.

Richard Dawkins has managed to go through his life bamboozling scientists into thinking he’s a great philosopher, and everybody else into thinking he’s a great scientist. In reality, he is neither.

As someone who was long fooled by Dawkins–back when I was an Atheist, I really thought he was at least a reputable scientist–I am sickened when I see a man who uses his science credentials to promote pseudoscience.

To my delight however, I was handed a prime opportunity to help publicly educate people on one of the most thoroughly noxious pseudo-scientists, pseudo-historians, and pseudo-philosophers on Planet Earth when I was presented by one of his followers with this hilarious paper:

“Peer reviewed papers” are so respected by Scientism fanatics they obviously don’t bother to read them. I, on the other hand, make a point of reading such papers before I trust them–after all, it’s an open secret you can’t trust the peer review system anymore.

Anyway, I read it. The paper clearly illustrates the fallacy of Memetic Theory with 30 pages or so of handwaving and smoke-blowing that attempts–and admittedly fails–to provide some sort of empirical framework for Memetics. This is fascinating on multiple levels. Read it yourself if you don’t believe me.

But first, notice the publisher: Journal of Bioeconomics. That journal is an obscure publication that “Encourages creative dialogue between biologists and economists.” Change that to “biologists and feminist academics” and tell me how it would read to you.

Second, I happen to know that the only peer reviewed journal that ever tried to make the case for Memetics as a real science, known simply as “Journal of Memetics,” ceased publication in 2005 due to lack of interest or much in the way of results. These researchers had been working on trying to make something real of Memetics since 1976–that’s right, 1976. They eventually gave up, having produced almost nothing coherent to back up the incoherent Memetic Theory.

So now fancy this: four years after the only journal to ever really take Memetics Theory seriously threw in the towel, some obscure Memetics advocates manage to get a tentative paper published in 2009. A paper where they admit clearly that Memetics is “empirically under-developed” and finally, after 30 pages of meandering handwaving, conclude with this devastating line:

Ours is a tentative first empirical move in organizational research toward the micro/macro resolution we see in biology.

That’s right kids. More than 40 years after Richard Dawkins first proposed Memetic Theory, two researchers published a “tentative first empirical move.” They don’t even claim they showed anything empirical, just that they may be close to having something that might be empirical someday. There’s been no followup that I can find.

Memetic Theory is busted. So, by the way, is Selfish Gene Theory.

If you doubt Selfish Gene is busted, you should see the way Dawkins’ fellow Atheist and far more accomplished Evolutionary Biologist, Lynn Margulis, demolished him at Oxford University just a few years ago: Margulis-Dawkins Debate, 2012.

Margulis, an Atheist, an accomplished Evolutionary Biologist, and a member of both the American AND Russian Academy of Sciences (a rare honor and distinction) showed that most life on Earth doesn’t even use nuclear DNA and freely swaps what genetic material it has with other organisms–and the human body has more such organisms in it than it has cells. This leads to the obvious question of what cells and organisms really use DNA for, and what the limits of DNA might be. While admitting to “liking” Selfish Gene as a crude way to describe large animals, Margulis utterly demolished the NeoDarwinist paradigm that ‘Selfish Gene’ is based on for an audience of some of the world’s foremost Evolutionary Biologists and other scholars.

This was a long time coming. Many biologists, especially young ones, knew it would happen because Margulis and quite a few others had been showing for decades already that NeoDarwinism (the basis of Selfish Gene) was bunk.

Even now, while there are some old grayhairs holding out for it, almost no one who studies evolution or genetics believes there’s anything to Selfish Gene or NeoDarwinism. As scientists say of incoherent gibberish, Selfish Gene is so bad it’s not even wrong. Only the dying remnants of Dawkins’ Celebrity Scientist cult still really hold out for it.

And by the way, Memetic Theory was specifically Dawkins’ effort to mesh Ideas and mental processes to Selfish Gene theory. In other words, Selfish Gene is the debunked “science” that Memetic Theory is based on.

You can’t get more pseudo-sciencey than one debunked theory on top of another debunked theory. Except maybe with “Feminist Theory” or “Social Justice Theory”.

What does all this mean? It means all the big things Richard Dawkins is known for–Selfish Gene, Memetic Theory, and the God Delusion–are all either pseudoscience, or not science at all. But it’s worse than that: They all run up against demonstrable science that proves them wrong.

Sorry Richard Dawkins Fans, but there’s no more substance to Dawkins and his work than the average ‘Famous Astrologer’ found at “Top Ten Astrologers.”

In reality, Mr. Dawkins just doesn’t like God as an idea, even though countless perfectly sane, non-delusional people know God is, at minimum, a perfectly rational and coherent concept based on evidence. (See http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/concepts-god Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for a rational analysis of the idea.)

I continue to double, triple dare any member of the “Online Skeptic Community” or their followers to read The Last Superstition. By the way, I hope any or all of them one day have the guts to finally start talking to theists who are at least as smart as they are.

*Update*: A check on the principle author of the 2009 (Jill Shepherd · Bill McKelvey) paper that attempted–and failed–to find a scientific basis for Meme theory was an obscure researcher with mostly a business management background, with a secondary author whose background is also primarily business management.

That’s a real cutting-edge research team right there. And neither seems to have published anything since 2009 on this or other major topics besides business management. No surprise. There’s no “there” there when it comes to “Memetic Theory.” Memetic Theory isn’t science and never has been.

*Update 2*: A former Dawkinsite, Sue Blackmore of The Guardian attended the “Explaining religion” conference in September of 2010. She spoke first, presenting the view from memetics that religions begin as by-products but then evolve and spread, like viruses, using humans to propagate themselves for their own benefit and to the detriment of the people they infect. By the end, though, she acknowledged that, while religions can be ‘memeplexes’ to an outside observer, they are not viruses, “unless we twist the concept of a “virus” to include something helpful and adaptive to its host as well as something harmful, it simply does not apply.” The article is online at the following location; https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2010/sep/16/why-no-longer-believe-religion-virus-mind.

Joe Brewer, wrote a fawning adulation of Dawkins’ Memetic Theory (https://evolution-institute.org/blog/a-forty-year-update-on-meme-theory/), focusing on how societal knowledge and developments are “translated into slogans, political speeches, editorial commentaries, and dinner table debates more times than can be counted.” He continues in this vein, stating that this body of tools and techniques can be applied to meme theory, demonstrating that “researchers across many fields have found value in the perspective that culture can be studied as information patterns that arise in a variety of social settings routinely and with modular elements that are readily discernible in each new instance. The claim that information patterns do not replicate is contradicted by the evidence for image-schematic structures (like the metaphor for taxes above with its distinctive inferential logic and recognizable use cases.”

Greg Downey of neuroanthropology.net wrote a scathing indictment of memetics at Neoruanthropology.net. In the blog, he openly states “I think ‘memetics’ is one of the bigger crocks hatched in recent decades, hiding in the shadow of respectable evolutionary theory, suggesting that anyone who doesn’t immediately concede to the ‘awesome-ness’ of meme-ness is somehow afraid of evolutionary theory. Let me just make this perfectly clear: I teach about evolutionary theory. I like Charles Darwin. I have casts of hominid skulls in my office. I still think ‘memetics’ is nonsense on stilts on skates on thin ice on borrowed time (apologies to Bentham), as deserving of the designation ‘science’ as astrology, phrenology, or economic forecasting.” ).

In his critique of memetics he begins with a declaration that “memetics sucks the air out of the room for a serious consideration of the ways that culture, knowledge, technology, and human evolution might be interrelated. That is, like a theory of humours and vapors in illness, it provides pseudo-explanations in place of just getting the hell out of the way of serious thought.” He continues by adding that he hates “the concept of ‘ideas replicating from brain to brain”. He states that he works in physical education and imitative learning; shouldn’t he be happy that memetic theory places such a premium on imitative learning? He lists Ten Problems with Memeticsto keep it manageable. I have copied his problems and summarized the issues for the sake of brevity.

1) Reifying the activity of brains: ‘Culture’ is already a bit of a reification (treating a complex of heterogeneous behaviors or concepts as a ‘thing’). Therefore, a ‘meme’ is a kind of super-reification of any human idea or concept. When a memeticist claims that ‘ideas replicate from brain to brain,’ we consider the potential meanings of what they are saying. To argue that ‘ideas’ are any form of self-serving agent that can replicate demands several layers of reification that are profoundly crippling to memetic theory.

2) Attributing personality to the reification of ideas: It’s one thing to reify a concept, it’s another thing to start attributing it a whole complex personality, drives, desires, and levels of different reification. This line of theororizing rapidly tumbles down the trail of ‘ideas have us’ rather than the reverse.

3) Doesn’t ‘self-replicating’ mean replicating by one’s self? There are problems with defining even a gene as a ‘self-replicating’ structure, like, if DNA is so self-replicating, why is it so chemically inert? (Hit to Selfish Gene theory) Self-replicating’ means, by definition, replicating by itself. Has anyone, ever, anywhere, seen an idea ‘replicate’ itSELF?

4) The term ‘meme’ applied to divergent phenomena. Calling an idea a ‘meme’ gets around the enormous problem of incommensurate phenomena in the same category. Memeticists refer to single ideas, strings of idea, melodies, and a host of other things as ‘memes.’ Even the most cursory glance reveals serious problems of scale; is a meme a single idea, a chain of ideas, a system of ideas, or an entire worldview?

5) Could memes transfer stably? Any tranfer of information is fraught with ‘transcription’ errors (try the game of telephone). Though the term ‘transcription’ risks dignifying the whole ‘meme=DNA’ metaphor which memeticists are abusing like a borrowed mule. Even teaching might demonstrate how utterly improbable it is that ANYTHING gets copied accurately

6) A host will not evolve traits in order for parasite to benefit: That is, unless a trait is beneficial in natural selection to the host, the parasite is not going to get evolution to create a better host for its own benefit. If the meme is truly a parasite, then there’s no way that the human brain is going to grow for the good of the meme.

7) Trivial examples as analogy to ideological change: A recurring problem in memetics theory is triviality being used to explain serious issues. These simplistic examples are then argued to be analogous to something like Christian conversion or the spread of capitalism, as if getting a jingle stuck in your head is like undergoing a major religio-ideological or political-economic social transformation.

8) Gradual cultural transmission not like infection: The metaphor of ‘infection’ is another one that gets used in memes, as it is clear that memes must have some sort of insidious dimenion. They argue that ideas are infectious. Are they saying that annoying commercials or insipid songs really take over our brains and is force us to do their bidding?

9) Objective ‘science’ inconsistent with normative judgments about memes: There’s this strong stream of judgment in most memeticists that’s inconsistent with evolutionary theory. Some argue that ‘toxic ideas’ are like the pathogens brought by explorers to the New World. They state that Western memes are wiping out indigenous ideas around the world in much the same way that European diseases obliterated native populations in the New World..

10) Resistance to memetics is not ‘anti-Darwinism; Darwinism not a religion: It’s not ‘Darwinism’ that Greg says he supports, like it’s a cult or a form of thought that he must follow religiously; adding that ‘Darwinism’ is only useful in that it is a theory that provides hypotheses to be tested, a powerful explanatory framework that explains some (though not all) phenomena

This was a long time coming. Many biologists, especially young ones, knew it would happen because Margulis and quite a few others had been showing for decades already that NeoDarwinism (the basis of Selfish Gene) was bunk.

Even now, while there are some old grayhairs holding out for it, almost no one who studies evolution or genetics believes there’s anything to Selfish Gene or NeoDarwinism. As scientists say of incoherent gibberish, Selfish Gene is so bad it’s not even wrong. Only the dying remnants of Dawkins’s Celebrity Scientist cult still really hold out for it.

And by the way, Memetic Theory was specifically Dawkins’s effort to mesh Ideas and mental processes to Selfish Gene theory. In other words, Selfish Gene is the debunked “science” that Memetic Theory is based on.

You can’t get more pseudosciencey than one debunked theory on top of another debunked theory. Except maybe with “Feminist Theory” or “Social Justice Theory.”

Finally, the notion of God as a delusion, which Dawkins is fond of asserting, has no empirical basis in psychological or psychiatric research, either. God As Delusion is unscientific poppycock. See my Proof from Evolutionary Psychology for references on that.

What does all this mean? It means all the big “scientific” things Richard Dawkins is known for–Selfish Gene, Memetic Theory, and the God Delusion–are all either pseudoscience, or not science at all. But it’s worse than that: They all run up against demonstrable science that proves them wrong.

In reality, Mr. Dawkins just doesn’t like God as an idea, even though countless perfectly sane non-delusional people know God is, at minimum, a perfectly rational and coherent concept based on evidence. (See Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for a rational analysis of the idea.)

Please support our work via Paypal or Bitcoin or Patreon. Atheists make a lot of claims on science, but what’s so funny about it is how few scientists will back up many of the claims they make, and how few scientists are actually Atheists. Indeed, Atheists are a minority among scientists even in places like China, where Atheism is rigorously enforced by the government, and most Nobel laureates in fields like Physics are Christians even today, with a good representation from believing practicing Jews and some other religions. And that’s because belief in God is rational and useful in a field like Physics, and is well-evidenced!

Atheism is no longer just the average person who decides they don’t believe in God or don’t find the evidence for God they’ve seen so far convincing. It is now an ideological hate movement and cult ideology, rooted originally in Marxist thought but now embraced by many libertarians and “conservative” right-wingers. The cult gets by by simply lying about the evidence wherever the find it.

In reality we have evidence in multiple fields in science. So to kick off an ongoing series we’re dubbing “Atheists Always Lie,” we will look at just one of the areas where we have evidence for God in contemporary mainstream science: Near Death Experience.

As a human being who often struggles with relatively trivial difficulties in life, I have long felt admiration for Stephen Hawking’s courage and determination to continue working in spite of a highly-debilitating disease. As a physics enthusiast, I have the greatest respect for his accomplishments. But now, as a result of an article published in The Guardian two weeks ago, I also feel embarrassment for, and disappointment in, Hawking. The article reported his views on religion and metaphysics — they were unoriginal, ill-informed, biased, insensitive, and even arrogant.